


Together and Separate

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 03:34:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6453757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What kind of daemon does Mako Mori have?   </i>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <i>Why isn't Mako Mori a pilot?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Together and Separate

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has:  
> \- Daemons.  
> \- Sad things.  
> \- Handwaving about the details of daemon-ing.  
> \- Sad things. This is tagged "Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings" and not "No Archive Warnings Apply" for a reason
> 
> Additional notes at the end.

I. 

There are Jaegers. There are kaiju.

In Alaska, in this universe, Stacker Pentecost lands in a helicopter. He follows Raleigh Becket into what Becket calls his office, and they talk about the state of the world. Stacker explains that every other Mark III Jaeger pilot is dead, but Raleigh says that he can't have anybody in his head again. 

Then, Stacker asks Raleigh: _would you rather die here or in a Jaeger_?

Closer to the ground, yellow eyes blink at the fox by Raleigh's knee. 

...

The Beckets had arctic foxes. The Hansens have dogs -- the father a red heeler, strength and instinct matched with surprising intelligence, the son a squat bulldog nicknamed Max in daily life because of the sheer, ridiculous improbability of something that short-legged and comedic being called _Eureka_. 

Other times, the Drift makes its own connections: Ranger legend says that when the Kaidonovskys went into Cherno Alpha, only one of them had a bear. Then, their fifth deployment. Seventeen consecutive hours in a neural handshake standing guard over Vladivostok in white-out blizzard conditions, followed by a two-hour solo war of attrition with a massive Category-2 trying to enter the harbor under cover of the weather. Apocryphally, Sascha and Alexis came out of the Conn-POD, bloodied, pale, but walking their own power and flanked by brown bears the size of small horses.

These days, her bear is bigger than his. 

...

Old photographs of Stacker Pentecost show a skinny boy with an equally skinny coyote, uncreatively named. Recent photographs show an animal built along similar lines, but different in important ways: bigger, taller, heavy in the shoulders, features shifted along a different axis. The coyote shows mostly in the pointed ears and long, narrow mouth. 

Tamsin Sevier had a wolf named Tango. 

...

"Six years ago. Three-jaeger team drop."

"That's right," Herc Hansen says, smiling. "Manila." 

Out of the corner of his eye, Raleigh sees Mako Mori with a delighted bulldog enthusiastically drooling over her -- Raleigh assumes it must be a pet, and Hansen looks down, too. 

"Don't drool on Miss Mori," he says, mock-angry, and Mako smiles at Hansen. Raleigh can tell they're old friends, happy to see each other, but Max lets everyone know she has objections to Mako paying attention to anyone else: when Mako stands back up, holding a drool-and-hair covered right hand out a little distance from her body, Max flops dramatically onto Mako's shoes. 

...

Tendo Choi has a lizard of indeterminate species. Hannibal Chau has an animal that he tries to pass off as some kind of rare American bear-dog, but is actually nothing more than an immensely fat _Didelphis virginiana_ \-- the common Viriginia possum. Newt makes jokes about how he would have enjoyed having an aquatic amphibian of the subfamily _Pleurodinlinae_ of the family _Salamandriae_ , which never fails to raise strong, vocal, pointed objections from his blue-eyed Siamese. 

Hermann Gotlieb has a golden-mantled tamarin possessing all the grace and speed he yearned for as an awkward fourteen year old using mobility aids and at the head of his classes at the Technische Universitat Berlin. His wife, Vanessa, has a confident lyrebird with an expressive voice and remarkably beautiful feathers.

...

What kind of daemon does Mako Mori have? 

...

Why isn't Mako Mori a pilot?

When Raleigh challenges Pentecost to let Mako fight him in the Kwoon, he assumes that she has a small daemon. A mouse, for example, or some kind of animal that lives in the pockets of her PPDC blouse: he can imagine her with something bright-eyed and sleek, soft to the touch, but sharp-toothed and fast in a fight. Shy, possibly. Raleigh's Danger says maybe five words a month, and Yancy used to joke those words were, inevitably, _You talk too much, Raleigh._ So, Raleigh concludes, maybe that's why Pentecost didn't make an introduction. Bold human, shy daemon. He's pretty sure that under that shyness, though, there will be teeth. Cunning. 

So he waits. 

And he waits. 

To get his attention and let him know that he'll be waiting a long time before Danger engages with her daemon, Mako steps into his first strike. 

...

Raleigh's memories start a disastrous chain reaction: in his first Drift with Mako, he goes back to Tokyo with her. Danger manifests as a cool touch at the back of his neck, but otherwise, Raleigh feels physically in the alleyway. He watches Mako stumble in, shoe in hand; he tries to tell her this isn't real, but neither she nor her daemon pay attention. First, her daemon first takes the shape of a moth, then becomes hummingbird as blue as her coat, then a small mixed-breed dog that licks Mako's tears while she sobs behind the dumpster. Raleigh tries again to tell Mako this isn't real, but when Onibaba's claw comes too close, Mako's daemon rushes out from behind the dumpster to protect her in the form of a tiger, striped and roaring. 

Onibaba pins it with a swipe of its claw, and Mako starts to scream. 

Onibaba raises the daemon to its mouth, still writhing on the end of one claw tip, and Mako staggers out from behind the dumpster, still screaming. 

Her hands are raised to trigger the plasma cannon. 

...

In LOCCENT, Tendo Choi manages to yank the plug. 

...

In history, in the listing of events that happened outside the Drift, Mako never came out from the dumpster to save her daemon. Instead, she screamed while Onibaba ate her daemon; she went on screaming while Coyote Tango fought Onibaba: for three hours, Stacker Pentecost burns, and for three hours, Mako screams. 

She doesn't stop until after Coyote Tango kills Onibaba, and when Stacker gets her in front of Shatterdome medical staff, the initial diagnosis is that her silence is a combination of physical damage and mental trauma from losing her daemon. Permanent neurological condition? Possibly.. The number of reported, confirmed instances of people surviving severing can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and while Mako shows no signs of catatonia or lethargy, there was almost certainly neurological damage. A developmental neurologist specializing in daemon pathology identifies probable damage to the the verbal centers. Possibly, higher reasoning. Emotional regulation and stability. Mako's brain scans look very little like a normal child's. 

"Here, here, and here," the doctor says, pointing at parts of the scan pinned on the board. Stacker presses her for detail of where and exactly Mako's brain differs from that of a normal, healthy child, and the doctor has a pen in her fingers. "These areas should be bright with activity, but you can see they're dark and they stay dark even when we started the flash cards." 

Stacker takes the news, blinks, looks down at -- 

...

Mako Mori has the temperament and the skills and the brains and the drive to pilot a Jaeger. 

She has the experience, too. When the Beckets and their daemons went into the Jaeger that became known as _Gipsy Danger_ , they had an Academy record of nineteen kills in twenty-four drops. Chuck Hansen had twenty seven kills in twenty-eight drops. To rack up fifty-one kills in fifty-one drops, Raleigh knows, Mako kept her hand in Academy form after leaving. On the other hand, no practice can overcome the fact that she does not have a daemon: she hasn't had one in decades, and she does fine in simulations, but how can she drive a Jaeger? The original attempt to split the neural load of a Jaeger was to divide it between a human and associated daemon: two minds, striving towards the same purpose.

Simulators are small enough to be driven by the electrical fields of human pilots, but how can a lone human mind drive two thousand tons of steel? Daemons are amplifiers. Is it even possible to Drift without them? Daemons are directly integrated into the Pons devices of Conn-Pods. 

When Raleigh chases after Mako in the hallway, he catches her elbow. 

"Mako, this is worth fighting for. You don't just have to obey him." 

"It's not obedience, Mr. Becket," Mako say. Suddenly, her eyes are full of pain and anger. 

"It's respect."

She closes the door in his face. 

...

Raleigh remembers that when he came stumbling out of the broken Jaeger onto a beach thirty-five miles south of Anchorage, he had his brother's daemon in his arms. Somewhere out there in the cold, wreckage-filled water, Yancy's Drift-suit was keeping him alive. They were miracles of modern engineering, but how long would the suit last? Another fifteen minutes? Another half-hour? How long could someone survive without their daemon in proximity?

Blood coated Raleigh's left side; Gipsy's breaths grew shallower and shallower. 

...

One night, two weeks after Scissure, two weeks into fighting the civilian powers into being allowed to adopt Mako permanently since her surviving family didn't want a daemonless girl who couldn't carry on the family tradition, one week after his PPDC superiors calling him on the carpet and asking him what he thought he was doing by putting in formal paperwork to adopt Tokyo's Daughter without prior approval from proper channels, Coyote nudges Stacker awake. 

_She's awake_ , Coyote says. _I can hear her._

So Stacker slides out of bed, rubbing his face. He leaves the lights off in his room, but turns on the ones in the hallway, then knocks on Mako's door. No response. Coyote nudges past him, and Stacker turns on the lights: it's a two-bedroom hotel suite. Stacker can't take her onto a Shatterdome without an identification card for her; he can't get the identification for her until he is her formal guardian. 

She isn't on the bed. It's been slept in -- small body, big hotel bed, but she isn't on there now. 

_Under here,_ Coyote says, and slides her front half under the bed. _Get her out._

Coyote sounds a little muffled, and when Stacker gets down on his knees, he sees Mako, a ball underneath the bed: Stacker lies down on his stomach and holds his hand out. 

"Mako?" Stacker says, softly. 

After a moment, Mako lets out a shaky breath, audibly full of tears. Stacker feels his chest tighten. 

"Do you want to come out?" Stacker says, softly. English, he knows, but he figures the tone conveys something. 

Mako doesn't say anything or react besides taking and then releasing another shaky breath. Too frightened, maybe, for anything else. Consequently, Stacker slides a little further under the bed, then puts his palm on her hair and tilts her head down a little. He wants to keep her hair from being snarled in the underside of the box spring; he wants to -- 

"Don't hit your head," Stacker says. 

Mako doesn't speak. Stacker hadn't expected her to: he tucks two fingers around her left armpit, keeps his hand between the top of her head and the underside of the bed, and gently, gently pulls her towards him. Steady pressure. Once Mako is out, Stacker turns on the bedside lamp for extra light. She winces -- Stacker doesn't want to think about how long Mako was awake, crying under the bed, but she looks unhurt. Dusty, pale, eyes round with fear and red with crying, but no scratches or blood or sign of neural overload. This is a nice hotel, better than Pentecost can technically afford, but what is money for except spending? Lawyers, hotels. He puts her up on the bed, and Mako is wearing the pyjamas they'd picked out at the department store, blue and white with a print of cartoon rabbits eating carrots and planting gardens and jumping rope, and he checks her hands: cold. Her cheeks: cold and more than a little damp and smeared with dust, but at least she isn't currently crying. 

At least she doesn't appear to have tried to hurt herself, as reported in some of the cases of people who have lost their daemons -- biting fingers bloody, throwing themselves against walls hard enough to dislocate joints, but unless restrained, continuing to do so to the point of broken bones. Stacker has been going to bed with medical journals. 

It doesn't make for comforting reading. 

As far as he can tell, though, Mako is upset, but unhurt. Breathing steadily. No blood. Eyes active and moving. 

So Stacker wipes his palm on the sheets. Then, he goes to the bathroom, gets a washcloth and wets it. He brings back a spare blanket from the closet and wraps Mako up in it, then wipes the dust off her cheeks and hair with the washcloth. Her eyes track him when he moves around the room; her eyes track Coyote pacing up and down on the carpet, and Stacker checks her hands again. Mako blinks in surprise: Stacker turns to look over his shoulder and gets blinked at, from the other direction, by Coyote. 

Round yellow eyes open one moment, closed the next, then open again. 

Then, quite deliberately, Coyote leans over and rests her chin on Mako's shoulder. 

...

Stacker remembers visiting Tamsin in the infirmary at the Tokyo Shatterdome: morning light through the window, Tamsin's breakfast untouched on the table, and the woman herself growling about the fact that they'd made her remove her remove her piercings to go through the scanner. Did Stacker know how long it took for her to get that back in afterwards, especially since she wasn't allowed to leave bed? Tango turns a long-suffering look onto Stacker, and Stacker laughs. He starts taking out the things that Tamsin asked for: hand lotion, mouthwash to get the taste of the IV drip medication out of the back of her throat, USB battery backup to charge her phone.

Then: 

"Mako thought you might like this," Stacker says and hands over, first, a hand-held mirror, light and small enough to fit in her hand after a day of chemotherapy and drips and scans, but big enough to be useful in reinserting facial piercings. 

"Useful," Tamsin admits. 

"Turn it over," Stacker says. Tamsin laughs when she does. The back has a red-headed girl with a picnic basket and a canine daemon. The girl is wearing a sky-blue dress and a straw hat with flowers on it; there are a lot of stars and curlicues and hearts and a nonsense English phrase. A lot of hearts, actually, and Tamsin laughs, but when she looks up at Stacker, her expression is -- 

They had a half-dozen kaiju deployments together. Stacker doesn't need hear the words to understand the reminder: occasionally, people are severed from their daemons. Most die instantly. A few linger and torment themselves to death, using pain to cover the hideous empty space. The transition from human to something less is inevitable, inexorable, always on a one-way direction. What does it mean for Stacker to take on another lost cause? 

But when Stacker looks out into the hallway, he sees Mako wearing a neat navy-colored coat, a miniature child version of his down to the PPDC eagle pins on the lapels. Her hair is brushed; her clothes are clean; she has a healthy appetite. Small blue clips keep bangs out of her face, and Mako studies a kaiju evacuation safety poster on the opposite wall. Stacker can see her mouthing the words to herself, frowning a little. At one point, she glances down at Coyote, and Coyote blinks back: Mako nods, a firm little movement of her head, then goes back to reading the kaiju evacuation poster.

At one point, a doctor and two nurses come down the hallway. 

Coyote conspicuously puts herself between Mako and them, uses her shoulders and head so that Mako doesn't have to see how their daemons -- 

...

How much do copilots need to trust each other? Enough to accept that the forms of their daemons may shift as a result of the Drift. Coyote and Tango begin as distinct, separate animals: even before Stacker Pentecost burned for three hours in order to stop Onibaba and keep a third Japanese city from being nuked, Coyote and Tango were blending into each other. 

Tango took on the long legs of a coyote; Coyote's muzzle broadened. 

...

Radiation poisoning from the Mark-I's affects daemons first: in the hospital after Onibaba, Tango looks small. Shrunken in on himself. He spends days without moving from the foot of Tamsin's bed, curled up into an impossibly small ball -- both Tamsin and Stacker are big people, and when their daemons began to blend together, they became larger. Tango got taller. Coyote put on the muscle and bulk of a wolf. _Bigger together than apart._

 _Better together than separate._

In the silence after Onibaba, Mako comes out of her hiding place and into the ruined street. Coyote is on the shoulders of a Jaeger, howling all the things Stacker can't let himself express or even feel: he is down in the Connpod, doing what he can to keep Tamsin and Tango awake and comfortable and feeling safe until medevac arrives. 

...

Stacker stands by Tamsin's bedside, and they watch doctor and two nurses come down the hallway. Coyote conspicuously puts herself between Mako and them and their daemons. 

After they pass, Mako goes back to studying the poster. 

When Stacker turns back to Tamsin, he sees the tears in her eyes, the long gash in the side of her head from when her head met the side of the Conn-POD when she was thrashing in her seizure. Mako's blue hand mirror is in her lap. 

Stacker reaches over and gently, lightly touches Tango's fur. 

Tamsin touches Stacker's hand. 

That summer, between Tamsin and Mako, he spends a lot of time in hospitals and doctor's offices. 

...

Who expects Mako to start talking again? Who expects Mako to live through to the end of the season? 

To celebrate, Stacker takes her on vacation. They go to Mount Fuji for three days, including an afternoon at an amusement park where Stacker is more notable than Mako. The afternoon features, in addition, a place that sells doner kebab. Stacker is enthusiastic until he has his first bite; he makes a face, but Mako eats hers, then finishes his and asks for ice cream. Mako helps Stacker navigate his Japanese cell phone and send Tamsin a video of Coyote watching the water fountains. 

Years later, in Hong Kong, Mako still has a postcard in her quarters, hanging next to the door. 

...

Only Coyote expects Mako to turn eleven. 

Only Coyote and Stacker expect Mako twelve, thirteen, then fourteen. 

When Mako turns fifteen, Tamsin starts letting herself hope that Mako will turn sixteen. 

When Mako is twenty, Tamsin dies, and when Mako is twenty-one, she walks into the Conn-POD of the rebuilt Gipsy Dange. She asks Raleigh Becket whether he is going to say anything. 

...

Raleigh and Mako are in the hallway. Mako has her hands tucked behind her back, and they can hear the Hansens with Pentecost: Chuck yells, saying that Raleigh went out of phase first. Stacker's voice is low and stopped more by the door. It sounds like he replies that they know. Then, Chuck says that he doesn't want Raleigh and Mako tainting his bomb run. _He's a has-been. She's a rookie_. 

Raleigh sees Mako blink, quickly, once when Chuck says that, another time when Chuck comes out. Chuck gets three paces down the hallway, then comes back. He calls her a disgrace -- he uses the words _two of you_ , but only looks at Mako. 

Mako keeps her hands tucked behind her back. They don't curl into fists until -- 

"Why don't you do us all a favor and just disappear? It's the only thing you're good at. " 

"Stop. Now." 

In turn, when Chuck says the word _girlfriend_ with an odd intensity, when he follows that up with words about _bitches_ needing a leash, Raleigh swings. Danger jumps down from Raleigh's shoulder to sink needle-sharp teeth into Max's back. 

...

When Raleigh asks, Tendo explains: if the bulldog is Chuck Hansen's daemon, what is she doing running towards Mako Mori? 

Because at the Academy, Tendo says, they paired Chuck Hansen and Mako Mori. It made sense, didn't it? The two of them were years younger than anyone else. Plus, it worked. A dozen drops, a dozen kills. As a Drift-compatible pair, they finished second in their class behind Indian fighter pilot twins a decade older, but when Australia committed to funding the Mark V, their first choice was an all-Australian combination. Failing that, they didn't want two unproven rookies. Failing even that, they didn't want two unproven rookies, one of whom didn't even have a daemon. What if the neural load was too much for her in the middle of combat? What if the one daemon in the Jaeger overloaded? She and Hansen and Eureka had done fine in simulations, but there was a difference between moving computer code and moving a two thousand tons of titanium. 

"So?" Raleigh says, knowing he sounds angry on behalf of Mako. 

Tendo shrugs. "So, they broke up, Becket boy. And then Command started trimming funding, and somebody had to rebuild Danger for the Marshal on glue and a shoestring." 

...

 _We're not an army any more, Mr. Becket. We're the resistance_ , Coyote says, looking at Raleigh with eyes as yellow as the moon over the Hong Kong Shatterdome. 

Then, she turns and trots into the bay doors ahead of them. 

....

"I'm sorry. I should have warned you," Raleigh says, quietly. "First Drifts are rough. But you weren't just tapping into my memories. You were tapping into my brother's, too. When Yancy was taken, we were still connected through our daemons." 

They're sitting in the Shatterdome maintenance bay, twenty floors up. Raleigh doesn't mind heights; Mako apparently doesn't either. He started by telling her a little bit about Wall construction while they ate, and now -- Yancy. Mako considers what he says. Raleigh can see her thinking about it. 

"I felt it," Mako says. "I know."

Their eyes meet, and Raleigh knows, down to the last atom of marrow in his bones, why the memory of Yancy pulled Mako into a RABIT: they both do. Raleigh stretches his hand out; Mako asks after the last time he saw a Jaeger's heart. Together, they lean back to look at her Jaeger's heart, glowing red and yellow on the Shatterdome Bay floor. Their hands bump against each other, but neither of them moves away. 

Danger is sleeping in Raleigh's lap with her tail wrapped around herself. She grumbles in her sleep. 

...

The night after he arrives in Hong Kong, Raleigh goes to have dinner with the Chois and meet young Felix. After he goes to bed, they sit around the kitchen table with beers, talking old times in Anchorage: Alison still works in the Shatterdome, quartermaster first-class, none of this front-line kaiju fighting nonsense, thank you very much, but nobody serves in Shatterdomes on three continents, through times like these, without having pride in the Corps. Plus, Alison likes Mako Mori. They had a lot to do with each other during the rebuilding of Gipsy Danger. 

Therefore, Alison tells Raleigh a Hong Kong Shatterdome legend about Mako Mori: she and Stacker had one lunch a week together, come rain or shine or Apocalypse. After all, kaiju don't rise for seven lunchtimes in a row, do they? So Mako was waiting outside Stacker's office, and some dipshit military brass was inside, wasting everyone's time. Stacker sends Coyote out to sit with Mako, with the end result that at one point, the brass's aide-de-camp comes back and sees this kid sitting there, hanging out with her daemon. 

He starts chatting her up, asking "What kind of dog is your daemon?" And Mako just looks at the him, and when he keeps grinning at her, she leads him on for a good ten minute chase, telling him about all the neighborhood dogs she modeled Bruno after. Stacker's daemon plays along, putting her chin on Mako's knee and pretending to stare off into space. 

Then, Pentecost walked out of his office. 

"I swear to God," Alison says, dissolving into laughter. "I got it straight from Marianne who was sitting right there. You know, Stacker's admin? And she said you should have seen that aide de camp's face -- his five-star boss skulking out of the office, limping after getting whipped by the Marshal, who turns to the girl he'd just been being _nice_ to and asks if they're ready for lunch. And this asshole realizes that he's spent ten minutes asking whether Tokyo's Daughter who was leading the reconstruction project on a Jaeger at twenty -- whether she could get Coyote to play fetch." 

"Not just any Jaeger daemon," Tendo adds for emphasis. " _Coyote_." 

Danger is stretched across Raleigh's lap. She shifts in her sleep; Danger is in her winter coloration, and she looks roughly as menacing as an eight pound ball of white fur with black button eyes can be. 

Raleigh thinks, scratching the back of her head and making her sigh in happiness, about how Mako had left Pentecost's office after he grounded her: tears in her eyes, one bow to the Marshal. 

One bow, just as deep, to Coyote. 

...

The double event happens six hours later. Tendo is just starting his morning shift with his sleepy, sluggish-on-cold-mornings lizard daemon on his shoulder. 

 

II. 

In dreams, human and daemon memories run together. 

The smell of wet trees, the taste of peanut butter in a human mouth. The bounce of the forest floor under paws carrying eight pounds of weight. A nest of juncos thirty-feet up, mother and at least three chicks. With his eyes, Raleigh spots a brown-and-white owl, sleeping in a tree, and Danger knows the presence of the same animal a mix of sound and scent: it is less precise, more temporal, but it is still knowledge. In dreams, Danger feels the tightness of a water-resistant outdoor shell that Raleigh outgrew last marking period, but Yancy hadn't outgrown his yet, so Raleigh would have to make do. In dreams, Raleigh smells, in four dimensions, in words that have no meaning in human language, a dozen black-tailed sitka deer having passed through at dawn. 

In the Drift, Danger bridges the gaps among Raleigh and Mako and three hundred fifty tons of titanium and reactor. 

...

Danger brings Raleigh Mako's memories, and she takes Raleigh's to Mako in turn. She binds them to each other and their Jaeger: when Raleigh comes out of the Drift after the double event, he is tired to the bone. He feels the blows that Otachi landed, but he also has a memory of red bean cakes made by a grandmother who died two years before Onibaba came to Tokyo. While walking through the doors of the Shatterdome maintenance bay, cheering crowds on both sides, Mako almost smells roast chicken from a Becket Sunday dinner. 

Daemons are the core of Jaegers, who are named for the daemons of their pilots -- Cherno Alpha, Striker Eureka, Gipsy Danger. 

Crimson Typhoon, in Chinese, has a three-word name. 

...

Leatherback catches Danger around the waist. Raleigh knows the idea is to crack the housing and disable the cables that connect torso and legs, but between one breath and the next, Mako supplies, wordlessly, that she isn't worried. That connection was a point she specifically reinforced when rebuilding Danger. Kaiju were getting smarter and smarter; after Kojiyama and Taranis both tried that trick, she made sure it wouldn't work with Danger. Raleigh feels Mako file information on Leatherback's grip strength away in their shared mind. 

Then, he feels Leatherback shift his weight. _He's gonna try to throw us._

Mako blinks. Raleigh knows that he and Danger do, too. 

_bar fight in Fairbanks, middle of winter, four hours between sunup and sundown and only Danger next to him -- sweat and pain and rage and bruises, having to learn to think fast enough to overcome disadvantage in size and reach -- orange juice unbearably alien on a fox tongue, kaiju alarms unbearably loud in fox ears_

Otachi crashes to its knees, and Gipsy Danger hauls up with its left hand, hits with the right. 

"Elbow rocket," Raleigh says, and the Jaeger replies in Danger's voice. 

_Elbow rocket engaged_. 

...

Afterwards, Raleigh finds out why Mako's thought inside the Drift included not just the Wei-Tangs and the Kaidanovskies but _For Mr. Pentecost, for Coyote_. 

In the passageway outside the Jaeger maintenance bay, Pentecost congratulates them, tells Mako he is proud of her, then moves on to telling the assembled crowd that, harsh as it sounds, there was no time to celebrate. They lost two crews, but it is no time to grieve. He intends a longer speech, but Mako's eyes go down to Coyote, and Raleigh looks, too: there is blood running out of Coyote's mouth and dripping onto the floor, slow and steady. The yellow eyes are glazed. 

...

The night after the double event, Raleigh has a nightmare: not the old good dream about the clearing, or even the usual nightmare about cold water and stiff limbs inside a Drift with his brother's dying daemon. But what can he call this dream besides a nightmare? It looked like a nightmare. It felt like a nightmare. Accordingly, Danger keeps her promise and wakes him by biting him harder and harder and harder as necessary: _one of these times, you're going to wake up without a finger_. 

The palm of his right hand is still bleeding when Mako knocks. She wears pajamas that match top and bottom, pale blue with blue piping around the cuffs, and she asks to see his hand. He shows her. Where's the first-aid kit? There should be one in his quarters, but he doesn't know where it is. Mako checks in the built-in desk, strikes out there, so she goes to the built-in closet and slides her fingers along the side until she finds it. 

"Really?" Raleigh sounds annoyed. 

"It took a month to find mine," Mako says, smiling. 

With her head ducked down like that, the blue frames her jaw. When she straightens, it swings back. She hands the box to Raleigh, and Raleigh manages to get the box open, but it's awkward with one hand, so they sit down on the bed. 

Mako picks through to find the disinfectant ampoule, then the container of liquid bandage -- one of the bites is at an awkward place at the base of the thumb, and she breaks the disinfectant on Raleigh's hand, spreading the disinfectant liberally. Puncture wounds can be deep, and Raleigh can guess what is happening. When Mako touches his wrist, gently, brushing where the pulse is, he knows for sure. 

She looks up, and they consider each other. They're ghost-Drifting -- Mako looks like she had been crying earlier, and when they're touching, bare skin on bare skin, he can feel the way the grief and joy and anger and eagerness mix together to form pain, like an old bone bruise set deep in the body. His own heart is still beating a little fast from the nightmare. Mako looks away first: she finishes dabbing the disinfectant off his hand, then waits a minute to let it dry before starting to paint the puncture wounds with liquid bandage. They're still sitting on the bed; the palm attached to his good arm is still resting on Mako's knee and they're waiting for the liquid bandage to dry. Mako has two fingers resting against the inside of Raleigh's wrist -- Raleigh hesitates. 

Mako leans over and kisses him. 

...

_Aren't you going to say anything?_

_No need. You're going to be in my head in five minutes._

...

Raleigh's right hand is out of commission until the liquid bandage dries, and there is a question in his head about what sex with someone who doesn't have a daemon will feel like, but they were practically Drifting on the Kwoon. Fifteen minutes ago, when Raleigh was asleep, they were ghost-Drifting. He doesn't know what sorts of dreams he was having, but Raleigh figures that's plenty intimacy, isn't it? Pulling straight images out of someone's head, to the point where they were scaring him. They Drifted together. Six hours ago, they killed two kaiju together. 

Mako leans over and puts her mouth on his, and he puts his hand on her back, slides it up over when he touches Mako's skin, he swears that he doesn't just get the feeling of her skin, warm and smooth. 

Instead, at the same time, he feels a hand against his skin. An old Wall-created callus that Raleigh has from bracing a welding torch. A rough place on his wrist where the leather gloves rubbed against his skin. The scar on his palm from when he was nine and tripped and put his hand on the hot wood-burning stove without thinking. Mako undoes the buttons on her pajama top, and Raleigh sucks in his breath -- he figured about three seconds after she came in that Mako didn't sleep in a bra, but knowing is different from seeing and touching and kissing her while she straddles him with her bare chest pressed against his. 

When he reaches up with his right hand, Mako smiles and pins his wrist, gently, to the bed. She doesn't need to say that the bandage isn't dry yet; Raleigh knows. 

Raleigh kisses her, and she kisses him back, gently, still holding his wrist to the wall. 

...

There is a condom in the first-aid kit. Afterwards, Mako falls asleep braced against his chest. Danger pads over and lies with her chin on Mako's shoulder and her tail tickling Raleigh's nose.

This time, the three of them dream about a clearing in Alaska in June. 

Danger chases dragonflies; Raleigh and Mako hold hands, and the air is cool and wet. 

...

Before, when Raleigh had been alone and woke up only because Danger was biting him hard enough to break the skin, what had he been dreaming about? Burning heat. Dry air. Strange landscapes. Light that looks -- 

How did Mako survive the loss of her daemon? 

...

In the beginning, Stacker took Mako through as much testing as he could, in good conscience, subject her to. 

The number of reported, confirmed instances where people survived severing could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Mako was doing better than could possibly expected -- not catatonic, every sign of being interested and interacting with the world around her, good appetite, normal body function, but who knew what the future might have? Stacker wanted to be prepared, and Mako couldn't talk. Instead, she stared at other people's daemons; she clung to Stacker. Initially, there was some discussion about whether she had somehow substituted Stacker for her daemon. A prominent developmental neurologist associated with Stanford Medical School volunteered her time and that of her team's. They specialized in daemon pathology, and they flew out to see Mako. 

They connected with a team at Todai interested in similar expertise; Stacker, accompanied by Mako's case worker, took her out for a series of scans. 

"Here, here, and here," the Stanford professor says, pointing at parts of the printout pinned on the board when Stacker pressed her for detail of where and exactly Mako's brain differed from that of a normal, child. There had been a pen in her fingers; the lights in the room were turned low in order to provide greater contrast for the scans. 

"These areas should be bright with activity, Mr. Pentecost," the doctor told Stacker. "But you can see they're dark. They stay dark even when we started the flashcards -- in laymen's terms, these are the areas responsible for signaling to daemons." 

"What about the areas that receive signals from daemons?" the caseworker asked -- she had good English. 

The Todai fellow says a few words, and for Stacker and the Stanford professor's benefit, the caseworker translates: "Substantially more activity than expected. We don't know the source. It could be residual fade from her daemon." 

Both of the academics had birds for a daemon; the caseworker had a frog daemon that rode on her collar like a broach. Coyote bumped her head against Stacker's knee, and when she gestured with her head, Stacker looked over his shoulder: through the caseworker, he'd asked Mako to stay outside in the hallway so that they could talk to the doctor, and shed been happy enough to watch the graduate students and their daemons interact with each other. Now, apparently, she had made clear that she wanted to be held up to the window in the door. She was looking into the darkness of the room, and there was enough light for Stacker to see that her face was worried. 

Coyote nudged him again, so Stacker waved. Together, they saw Mako smile, satisfied, then twist to be let down from the window and back to the ground. 

...

For a while, they thought that Mako bonded with Coyote: after all, Coyote would touch her, and she would touch Coyote. Stacker woke at night when Mako had a nightmare; he trailed six feet behind, sleepy, while Coyote trotted into the room and nosed around under the bed. If the bed was high enough off the ground, Coyote would pull Mako out herself. If not, Stacker lay down on his stomach, used his hands to guide Mako out without bumping her head or catching her hair on the underside of the frame, lift her up, check to see if she'd wet herself, and if not, lie down on the bed and settle her on his chest. When Coyote laid her chin on Mako's shoulder, Stacker felt a slight prickle along his back, but it was mostly warmth. Comfort. No more or less sensation than as if he were holding the inside of his own wrist. 

Mako's shaky breaths steadying once Coyote touched her. Mako slowly letting go of his shirt front. Mako coming out of her fear enough to try a little English in his direction, and Stacker would try a little Japanese, and she would suck back tears and gently, politely, in a loving way, correct him. 

Stacker remembers that happening in Tokyo, in Hong Kong, in Lima. Remembers -- 

... 

On the floor of the maintenance bay, Stacker comes out of the tunnel in a Driftsuit. Then, he and Coyote step to the side. 

"You're a brave girl," Stacker says. "We're so lucky to have seen you grow." 

Mako looks down, and Stacker too: Coyote leans her nose against Mako's hand, yellow eyes steady and wide. 

Mako runs her hand her hand over Coyote's muzzle, prematurely gray from radiation poisoning and carrying half the weight of the world since shutdown -- Mako starts crying, tears rolling diagonal across her cheeks. 

...

Body and memory, daemon and soul, humans and dreams. Daemons know the facts their humans tell them; humans feel what their demons experience. In REM cycles, Drift partners fall into the memories of each other's daemons. 

Mako loves Stacker more than she loves any human on Earth. Coyote has, almost from the beginning, touched Mako and concerned herself with Mako and slept with one ear listening for the sound of Mako's heart: nevertheless, Mako does not dream Coyote's dreams. Stacker never tastes the red bean cakes from the grandmother who died two years before Onibaba; Mako never smells groundnut stew with yam dumplings made by Mrs. Pentecost for her son and his leggy, too-skinny daemon in an over-hot, too-small kitchen in Tottenham. 

"You can finish this," Stacker tells Mako. 

Raleigh feels, as his own, vast grief and deep resolve. Heat. 

...

In a darkened room at the Institute for Medical Science, two eminent developmental neurologists agree. 

They tell Stacker that parts of Mako's brain that should be lit are dark. Parts that they expect to be dark are lit. How long can Mako stay alive and well? Days pass. Then weeks. Then years. The lit parts of Mako's brain stay lit. The dark parts stay dark, and the theory advanced by the Stanford team, in a carefully anonymized case study published years later in the _New England Journal of Medicine_ , is that Patient M was getting the necessary neural feedback from intense contact with her adoptive father's daemon. The Todai team favored the idea of her being unusually, miraculously resilient to severing. 

Either way: Coyote with Stacker, then Max at the Academy, then Coyote again. On the Shatterdome floor, Stacker looks down at the floor and sees Danger standing by Mako's ankle. Black eyes look out of a small, snow-white face. 

...

Mako's survival has nothing to do with Stacker Pentecost or Chuck Hansen or Raleigh Becket or even Coyote and Max and Danger. 

Instead, in an alleyway almost fifteen years before, Mako's daemon gives her tear-streaked face one last lick, then twists out of her arms, changing as he goes and rushing at Onibaba in the form of a tiger, fierce and striped. He roars to drive the kaiju back, but only manages to make Onibaba shift to maneuver. 

A heartbeat later, Hoshi is lifted in the air, pierced through by the tip of a claw the size of a truck. 

Mako rushes out from behind the dumpster. She screams. Hoshi screams and writhes, trying to shift. 

...

How does a daemon choose its shape? To comfort Mako, Hoshi takes the form of a dog that they used to see at the beach in Tanegashima, and he tries to lick her tears away. To guide her to the dumpster, Hoshi slips into the form of a bright hummingbird, ducking and weaving to guide her to a small, safe place that Onibaba will have difficulty reaching. To protect her, even though Mako sobbing for him to stay and trying to grab him, Hoshi rushes out as the most frightening thing either he or Mako have ever seen: he is a tiger, roaring and lashing his tail. 

Onibaba pins him through the back, breaking his spine, and Mako screams. Her father is dead; her mother lies underneath a block of concrete the size of a small car. Driven by Mako's fear and anger and terror and panic and pain, and his own fear and anger and terror and panic and pain, Hoshi barely knows his own shape. 

He is trying to trying to turn into something, anything, so that the kaiju will let go. 

So that Mako won't be alone. 

... 

What are daemons, but conglomerations of Dust? What are kaiju but the monstrous, fused daemons of the Precursor group mind? Form imposes identity. Form creates purpose and security. One kaiju might die, but it is only a segment. A temporary loss. A tiny portion of the overall. 

At the moment of his death, in a singular miracle driven by despair and Dust, Mako's daemon --

In the Anteverse and outside, Dust knows Dust. 

...

The Stanford team postulates that Patient M is getting the necessary neural feedback from intense contact with her adoptive father's daemon. The Todai team favors the idea of children being more resilient than adults to severing. During a poster session at a medical conference in Brussels addressing the Kaiju Dust phenomenon, a researcher from Tsinghua approaches the second author of the Stanford paper and asks: off-topic, but did they consider the possibility that Patient M's daemon was still alive, just physically distant from her? It had the appeal of simplicity. 

The Stanford researcher shakes her head. She explains that they considered that possibility, but the math didn't work out. Turad's Calculation suggested that the strength of a connection was inversely proportional to the square of distance, but directly proportional to the mass of the daemon. Patient M had visited areas far from Tokyo. After the formal study ended, Patient M and her guardian kept in touch with the researchers. Recently, Patient M had spent several days in New York City without ill effect. 

To sustain a connection across continents in that way -- 

The researcher from Tsinghua nods. "The daemon would have to be massive. Enormous."

"We did the numbers. Bigger than dinosaurs. Bigger than kaiju. Bigger than anything we've ever seen on this planet." 

...

Driven by fear and desperation, Mako's daemon attacks a kaiju. Dust connects with Dust, but freak luck is also involved, because other daemons have attacked kaiju. Other attempts have been made, and they have, without exception, failed.

Nevertheless, at the moment of its death, Hoshi fuses with the kaiju overmind, such that Mako's connection with her daemon transfers to the group-daemon of the Precursors. The mass of one kaiju is enormous. The mass of the joined daemons of an entire sentient species is unfathomable: the night after the double event, Raleigh dreams about heat and darkness and unfathomable alien spaces filled with red light. He thinks it is a nightmare, and feels validated when Mako comes to door. She has been having the same dream. The dreams are, for some reason, stronger when she is in Hong Kong, the closest city to the Breach. 

Mako kisses him. 

Raleigh kisses her back. 

...

As they drive towards the Breach, Mako's eyes glitter. Her breath comes hard through her mouth. Raleigh feels himself breathe harder in response: as much as he can, he tries to lend her his strength. Leg crushed and arm gone, his side of the Jaeger is dead weight. The Drift is an enhanced version of the link between human and daemon. Inside the Drift, Raleigh knows with clarity how badly Danger hurts; outside the Drift, he would not feel it with the same intensity or clarity except in dreams. 

On the edge of the Breach, a Category V kaiju rises up again, and Mako drives the chain-sword through its head.

They fall into the Breach. The oxygen feed to Mako's side of the Jaeger has been damaged. Raleigh Becket feels a wash of heat and red light. It feels strangely, oddly, intensely familiar. Almost as if he has been there before in dream.

...

Who expects Mako to live out the week if her daemon-connection has been severed? To celebrate, when Mako is alive two months later, Stacker takes his first vacation from the PPDC as an _administrator_ , and they go to Mount Fuji for three days, including an afternoon at an amusement park that features a replica doner kebab stand. Stacker is enthusiastic until he has the first bite; he makes a face, but Mako eats hers, then finishes his and asks for ice cream. Mako helps Stacker navigate his Japanese cell phone and send Tamsin a picture of Coyote watching the water fountains. 

"This is nice," Mako says. Her enunciation is careful. 

" _Sou desou_ ," Stacker says. His accent is pronounced. 

Coyote is sitting between them, content in the sun. He stretches. "When the war is over," he says, "we'll go to London and have some real kebab." He conveys his contempt for the kebab they had earlier with a twitch of the shoulder and movement of the tail. 

Stacker laughs. Mako clearly wants to hug Coyote, but she is sticky from ice cream, so Coyote starts to lick her, first her cheeks, then her hands, and Mako is giggling because her tongue is wide and warm and tickles. 

There is sunlight. There are good memories. 

...

Afterwards, Raleigh is part of, and the primary target, of a briefing from medical: it is unlikely, but if it happens, press this button to alert us. We will be monitoring her brain activity, but you understand how medical readings in this situation can be complicated. Try to keep her comfortable. 

If she doesn't remember, don't remind her. 

Be with her. Say goodbye if you need to. Remember -- 

...

To sustain a connection across continents in that way -- 

The researcher from Tsinghua nods. "The daemon would have to be massive. Enormous."

...

Working together, every breath and motion and movement and thought matched, through the sacrifice of countless others including Stacker Pentecost and Chuck Hansen, Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket permanently close the Breach. 

Afterwards, Raleigh sits in hospice care with monitoring equipment and Mako. The monitoring equipment is quieter than he expects: a picture of a brook running through a mountain scene hangs on the wall. Danger picks her way carefully over the sheets and finds a place next to Mako's still right hand, but not quite touching: she tucks herself into a ball and looks over at Raleigh once, then closes her eyes. She is ready to wait as long as it takes, and Raleigh sees how blowing air from the overhead vent makes the black-tipped fur on her back move. 

Mako is still breathing on her own; her autonomic system is, for now, still functioning. 

Carefully, gently, Raleigh reaches out and touches her left hand. 

...

Did Stacker know? 

After hours of consideration, Raleigh concludes that he didn't. If he had, Pentecost would have put the scientists to the question: not drawn back from closing the Breach to save humanity, if required, if necessary, but he would have protected Mako as long as possible, as he did with piloting. 

Did Mako? 

She knew, Raleigh thinks, after she drove the chain-sword through Slattern's head. The Breach opened underneath them, and they fell forward into red light and the promise of heat like in her dreams. How long had she been having those dreams? Years. Decades. Ever since Tokyo. Raleigh had seen reports of failed prior bombing runs. It was assumed that the reported heat and light were result of detonation. Mako would have seen the documents in detail, would have been in the Shatterdome for the scuttlebutt. 

Mako pushed to pilot a Jaeger. Mako drove the blade in Slattern and kept it there. Raleigh remembers her determination, fierce and hot and vast and unrelenting as the Anteverse. Had any part of her been drawn from it? 

...

Working together, every breath and motion and movement and thought matched, Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket permanently close the Breach. 

Afterwards, with helicopters on the way, two escape pods surface. Tracer dye leaks into the water. 

Raleigh Becket wakes; his daemon leaps into the water and swims for Mako.

**Author's Note:**

> SO YEAH IT TOOK A WHILE TO FINISH THIS. 
> 
> All the good ideas in this came from [destronomics](http://destronomics.tumblr.com). Thanks to [conraddalesshuttershades](http://conraddalesshuttershades.tumblr.com) and [furius](http://archiveofourown.org/users/furius/pseuds/motleystitches) for being sympathetic ears and sounding boards. If the patter from the Drift or the style of action sounds familiar to you, that's because I've drawn heavily from [Icarus by starkraving](http://archiveofourown.org/works/919026), which is quite possibly one of the best fics about Chuck Hansen in fandom, and probably my favorite fic about piloting a Jaeger. Thanks to [marmolita](http://marmolita.tumblr.com) for language help. 
> 
> And if [mienuxbleu](http://mienuxbleu.tumblr.com/) hadn't shown up at my actual door and basically nagged me into writing, this would never have gotten finished.


End file.
